Jonathan Ross's new Saturday night ITV1 chatshow is sponsored by Mini Coupe under the slogan "Another day, another adventure", presumably hoping to associate the car with the presenter's racy reputation.

The problem with this metaphor is that it invites the possibility of car-crash television. The opening show, though, avoided this, settling for a gentle spin around some showbiz landmarks: the guests were the actor Sarah Jessica Parker, the racing driver Lewis Hamilton and the singer Adele. The latter was the only cause of warning toots on the horn, with ITV bleeping out two expletives in her answers.

For many of the ITV1 audience, Ross will have begun with the advantage of not being Piers Morgan, who would almost certainly have been in this slot had CNN not signed him up. But there are still drawbacks to being Jonathan Ross. The main interest in advance was the extent to which presenter and format might have been re-invented following a frustrating final year at the BBC, when strict editorial controls were introduced after the controversy over obscene phone calls to the actor Andrew Sachs on a Radio 2 show.

However, it was soon clear that the host was taking his cue from Hamilton in sticking with formula one. Apart from the interruption of commercial breaks, there was not much obvious difference either in Ross – his floppy hair just as long at 50, his chin perhaps a little fuller – or the set, which lacked only his former house band at the BBC, Four Poofs and a Piano.

The show averaged 4.3 million viewers, a respectable performance in Saturday ITV peak time; this is up on his BBC1 figures but a much larger audience is available in this earlier slot.

Just as in the days when he trousered a reported annual £6m from the licence fees, the guests were seen through a window sitting backstage on one sofa before they came out to sit at another sofa.

As he has done ever since he set out in the 80s to be the English equivalent of the US talkshow star David Letterman, Ross sat behind a paperclip-shaped desk, from which he produced comedy props (bacon jam) and delivered, with the help of five writers listed in the credits, topical gags.

A couple of these concerned looting during the riots, a decision that tested notions of topicality rather than of taste. The ITV1 time slot is much closer than his BBC1 show to the 9pm watershed, which the TV regulator Ofcom has pledged to enforce more rigorously, and so, as Ross acknowledged to Adele in one exchange: "I've got to be on best behaviour, ain't I?" This was a tacit admission that ITV1 has not asked for Ross Uncut, free of BBC interference.

Ross's chatshow persona has always been a curious combination of luvvie and thug and it was his sycophantic side that dominated this show. Hamilton was a "charming guest and a fabulous talent", Adele is "a superstar and you deserve every bit of it", while Parker, given two huge plugs for her new film, was told: "I love seeing you in movies, I love seeing you on TV!"

The chats felt loosely researched. "Sex and the City has been part of your life for 13, 14, 15 years?," he suggested to Parker. "12 years, 10 years," she lowered the bids, making the conversation sound like a Nasa countdown. Both she and Adele looked baffled at some of the more clever-dick questions.

Ross came closest to a bad-boy moment when asking the Sex and the City star about "mummy and daddy time at home – do you lock the door?" and feeding her some typical UK foods to permit the revival of a gag he's done a few times before: "You're a good girl. Everything I've asked you to put in your mouth tonight, you've done it!"

The overall tone, however, was plugging and chuntering. This felt like an edition of Aspel & Company with the addition of a fellatio joke.

Parker, discussing her baby twins, earnestly asserted that the baby girls were "physically, emotionally and psychologically" completely different. In contrast, Ross seemed the identical twin of the neutered slightly unsure figure he cut in his final months at the BBC. When wisdom suggested fresh directions, he has settled for pressing the resume button. ITV shareholders will hope that at least the salary isn't the same.